Assetto Corsa EVO’s Early Access launch has felt a bit like trying to drive British roads over the last couple of years. There’s more potholes than you can shake a stick at, an endless string of road works as water pipes burst and need emergency repairs, as alt nets dig trenches for their own fibre networks, and more. Kunos Simulazioni’s games are lauded as some of the best driving and racing sims out there, but on day one that’s coming with more than a few rough edges.
Of course, that’s exactly what Early Access is for. It’s there to let developers release early with a subset of content, an acceptance of bugs and issues, and a preview of what’s to come through a roadmap of updates. Even so, Assetto Corsa Evo has stalled at the starting line on some of its key features.
It’s a tale that’s practically as old as online gaming: server issues. Assetto Corsa Evo is planned to be an always online game, tying progression through the career, car unlocks and more to being logged in, much like we see in Gran Turismo 7. While this can be nominally justified to preserve the integrity of a game’s experience when seeing other players, when the servers don’t work (whether that’s launch day overloading or at the inevitable shutdown sometime in the next decade), it locks off major parts of the game. In Assetto Corsa Evo’s case, it meant the first batch of 20 cars was initially locked down to just 5 on day one, until Kunos hurriedly patched the game to make all cars available without the nascent career and driving academy.
Online features are now being separately stress tested through specific beta builds and time windows, working to build it back into the main branch of the game as soon as possible.
That’s far from the only issue at this point, with bugs in setting up racing wheels – though immediately recognised, there’s no obvious preset for my Fanatec CSL Elite and McLaren wheel, and I had to disable other controllers to have it recognised – some complaints over performance with the initial release, a general clunky sluggishness to the menus and making adjustments, and odd choices like listing each car’s livery as though it’s a separate vehicle.
A lot of that can and will be fixed over time, so it’s great to see that the main thing that matters – the physics and handling of the cars – is as accomplished and enjoyable as ever. There’s a good spread of cars included in this initial Early Access launch, from road cars (well, sporty versions of road cars like the Abarth 695 Biposto version of the souped-up Fiat 500) through to a Mercedes GT2. There’s no sign of the GT3 cars that were the star of Assetto Corsa Competizione, so there’s fewer apples-to-apples comparisons to make there.
Cars are generally rather grippy, and you can really get some of the heft that is inherent to the chunkier road cars in the game, like the BMW M4 CSL. At the same time, there’s Brands Hatch and Laguna Seca in the game from the off, both tracks with iconic precipitous drops that give you that stomach-dropping sense of lift as you try to go through them, and you really feel that through both the force feedback and the visuals, the weight of the car moving around through the corner.
The foundations are there, but there’s still plenty of work for Kunos to do for the simulation and the surrounding racing experience. The force feedback can be a bit inconsistent – not least because it sometimes doesn’t want to activate for the wheel – the AI when racing is not the most engaging and a bit dim. The graphics engine also comes off as nice and accomplished, this being a new self-developed engine from Kunos, instead of Unreal Engine as was used in Assetto Corsa Competizione.
There’s a long road ahead for Assetto Corsa EVO, both in terms of Kunos quickly racing to fix up the initial release of the game with online servers, career and events, and the path ahead to the full launch. Some of the biggest draws are some way off into the future, with things like the open world Eifel freeroam region around the Nurburgring, and the essential online multiplayer still to come.
As it stands, then, Assetto Corsa EVO is not yet an essential buy. It’s got a cut price for the Early Access launch, so it’s tempting to grab the game now and dabble with it, but as usual, you’ll also need to accept that it’s a rough draft – and rougher than expected at this point in time. It might not take too long, but there will be a wait for this to start to realise its potential.
